An international research group led by Beatriz Villarroel from the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden and the Institute for Astrophysics on the Canary Islands reports something strange in the current issue of The Astronomical Journal. They compared star maps from the 1950s with recent surveys, and discovered that 100 previously catalogued stars cannot be found anymore.Sign of Dyson spheres or other advanced technological societies doing something to their stars? Probably not, but you never know:
Perhaps the missing objects are signs of an advanced civilization. But they’re probably not Dyson spheres. First, it would be hard to explain why and how such a giant construction project, completely shading out the light of the host star, could be done within the short period of less than a century. But more importantly, Brooks Harrop and I showed nearly 10 years ago that “traditional” Dyson spheres are not gravitationally stable. Even if one could be built near a star like our Sun, it would require more total mass than is available in all our Solar System’s planets, moons, and asteroids.
But there are other interesting possibilities:
So what are the missing stars? A few might be explained as flaring stars whose brightness dropped below the detection limit, or stars that collapsed directly into a black hole. A large portion, however, might represent new stages in the life cycle of certain stars or new stellar phenomena that have not yet been seen. That by itself would be an exciting topic to investigate.
Another intriguing question: Where are the missing stars? Are they at the same location, just not emitting light anymore? Or perhaps they’ve moved to some other location. If the latter, could some of these represent huge starships, the size of moons or planets, that moved outside the field of view? This, of course, is a highly speculative suggestion. But it would address the hotly discussed Fermi Paradox, and would, in principle, be testable. If these “missing” light sources represent giant starships, some should appear in new star surveys in some other part of the sky. In an ideal case, we might even be able to track their trajectories through time. It would be challenging, no doubt, to pick out such motions against other background movements in space, like those of stars spinning around the center of their galaxy. Nevertheless, my suggestion to the authors is to focus their future work on light sources that suddenly appear in new star surveys, and see whether they can be correlated to the stars that vanished.
You wouldn't go with the Dyson Sphere. You'd simply tap electricity directly. Solar wind is direct electricity. Plus since the aether is a resistor it also is a capacitor. There is more or less infinite electrical energy there for the taking. The Dyson sphere is something you wouldn't bother with, except incidentally. Like if you already had all these gravity free factories up there you might take light-energy just as an after-thought, seeing as the electrical energy is already there.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of missing stars, since stars are really just giant planets, if they have a lot of their atmosphere sucked off them they may no longer shine but could wind up orbiting another star as a giant rocky planet. A wandering star could get in a tug of war with a normal star and lose a tug of war losing much of its atmosphere or vice versa.. So if they were there in the first place they may have lost the initial bigger star they were orbiting a long time ago. Or simply never picked up anything much else to orbit. They could be wandering stars.
ReplyDeleteBut even more likely its just public sector blundering. However my point is that stars are big planets. It takes a giant atmosphere to produce a proton wind and become a full-blown star. If that atmosphere is lost the lights go out.
Wish we could hang you and Gomer dangling from a Dyson sphere, stepford.
ReplyDeleteMy conception of the star, the last few layers are gasses lined up in order of molecular weight. But they last four layers are helium, hydrogen, protons, electrons. Since the protons and the electrons are separated we get charge separation and this leads to charge buildup. Since the protons conduct this energy but the hydrogen and helium don't, the electric energy starts moving horizontally creating the photosphere.
ReplyDeleteSo the type of object we have is dependent on the electrical environment. If the star strays into another electrical environment this will effect how it manifests. It might now manifest as a reasonably inert ultra-large gas giant, or as a brown dwarf. Since those swarming protons will be subject to forces of positive electrical charge in its midsts.